She Made Me Laugh: My Friend Nora Ephron

Introduction

Life is about seat assignments.

You’re born in a certain place to certain parents in a certain family, sent to a certain school where you’re assigned a certain seat. It was no different on June 17, 1968 when at the age of twenty-seven and with the studied pose of a newspaperman, I was assigned a certain desk in the newsroom of the Washington Post. On either side of me were people who I have since forgotten, but directly behind me was the man who was going to get everything rolling. He was Carl Bernstein, who would introduce me to Nora Ephron, who would introduce me to the world that I would inhabit for the next forty years or so. She would become my friend, ultimately my best friend, my mentor as a writer, my counselor when I was troubled, my role model in showing what was possible and the doorman to the rest of the world. With the sweetest of smiles, she would set my table and serve my food and bring me to the theater and to the movies over and over again. She would introduce me to her friends, who were sometimes famous, sometimes not, who were always talented and always smart, who had great humor and who lived immense lives, sometimes with blockbuster movies and sometimes with worthy but obscure novels, finally, to her final and lasting husband, Nick, a writer of classic film-noirish screenplays, a successful author, a former police reporter, a man of the film-noirish street and the literary salon whose great strength was his reserve and whose mission was to make Nora Ephron happy. He succeeded.

She had come at me like a gale. She had come down to Washington, dropping the names of the famous, making exotic references, wearing the clothes of the 1970s but the aura of the 1950s and 1960s—Broadway and Hollywood and, of course, tabloid Manhattan where she had worked. She was a lot of talk, so it took a while to discern that she was all-purpose, straight on, like some sort of sleek torpedo, steaming to a career that had been mapped for her by her parents, particularly her mother. Phoebe Ephron would die before she should have, of drink and dashed hopes, but her life had really been a triumph. She was a woman in an age of girls, a writer for the Broadway stage and the Hollywood film, who had abandoned the steno pad for the writer’s tablet and the typewriter—who was doing what few women of the time did, and all the while raising four girls.

She died before I could know her, but nevertheless I know her. She is smart and she is tart and she is warm and she is cold. She writes fast and well and sets a swell table and she will not be confined by any supposed roles for women. She is a writer and she will write until she can write no more. I know her from her daughters, especially Nora, and I respect her for what she did and I am in awe of her for what she was. Nora modeled herself on Dorothy Parker, the writer and wit from the middle of the twentieth century, but Nora did better than that, and the reason she did was because her mother showed her how.

Nora Ephron was not an orthodox feminist. She quibbled and sometimes quarreled with the movement, but she supported it totally and her life was one of full-throated feminism. She loved being a woman—loved it for all its feminine virtues—and loved being one of the girls. She surrounded herself with women, sought out the talented ones, gave them lunch, encouraged their careers, understood their problems as a man could not—and, if she could, made cookies for their children.

Nora wrote about her parents, but not about her own family. There are no cute essays about what her boys did growing up—the usual sitcom calamities of childhood—but her motherhood was fully engaged and enveloping. She was proud of her boys, Jacob and Max—proud of their talents (writing, music), proud of their independence, and proud of their courage. She was never a typical woman, but in many respects she was a typical mother.

For almost forty years, Nora Ephron was a very close friend. But I worked on only one project with her, a script that went nowhere. Aside from her husband, she was probably closest to her sister, Delia. The two collaborated on many projects, movies and plays, while at the same time pursuing independent careers. As sisters and writing partners they had their ups and downs, but never an irrevocable breach. As Nora was dying, Delia sat at her bedside while the two of them worked on a pilot for a television series.

Nick, too, was an occasional writing partner. They worked on a remake of Love Me or Leave Me, a Doris Day–James Cagney vehicle about the torch singer Ruth Etting, but as is frequently the case in Hollywood, it never got made. (Movies that don’t get made can’t bomb.) Informally, however, they collaborated on everything they did. They were both writers, just like Nora’s mother and father. Nick was the husband Phoebe never had. Nora was the Phoebe that Phoebe could never quite be.

I found Nora’s life to be bigger than I had ever imagined—deeper and even more heroic, too. She was central to the lives of so many people. She gave money to causes she favored—the Public Theater, for one—and time to people who simply asked. She was my peerless tugboat, nudging me this way and that. We went through a lot, often together—usually laughing, sometimes crying, always relishing our dumb luck. I am not sure which is better—to have loved her or to be loved by her. Either way was a blessing. Either way, it began with a seat assignment.

Room 242

As she went in and out of consciousness, she was typically observing the process. In out, in out, she said. So it’s happening. The room, 242 of New York Hospital, faced south, so if she raised her head she could see down the East River and, over a bit to the west, the skyline of midtown Manhattan. This was her city. She had come from the West to claim it, to make it her own, to know its writers and actors and politicians, but especially the writers because she was one herself, her fame as a director notwithstanding.

People drifted in and out of the room. Husband. Children. Friends. Relatives. Her dying was taking longer than expected. She had acute myeloid leukemia and it had devolved into the inevitable and unavoidable pneumonia, and so the end was coming, although it was taking its own sweet time. She was awake and then asleep. Sometimes alert. Sometimes not. She lost track of time, once asking in late afternoon to watch an early morning TV show, Morning Joe. Outside, the river reversed course as estuaries do, sometimes going north, sometimes going south. It seemed apt.

Calls were being made. The famous, the somewhat less famous; the talented, the brilliant; the immensely rich, the merely rich, the non-rich; the established writers, the young writers; the struggling young actors, the struggling older actors; Hollywood, New York, East Hampton, Paris, London, and the African American neighborhood of distant Riverhead on Long Island where she had put her longtime maid’s daughter through college.

A summoning was in process, a call to assemble for a memorial service. There would be no funeral, no imprecations to a god she did not believe existed. (She was mystified that anyone could believe otherwise, and she abhorred the senseless platitude that everything happens for a reason.) So a call went out to various halls—the Ethical Culture School on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and the Council on Foreign Relations on the Upper East Side. Too small. They were all too small. Slowly, it became apparent that a larger hall would have to be secured, something with about a thousand seats. Word of her impending death was spreading, and you could feel a stirring, a deep pain, a tsunami of bereavement that was building and building and which now seems appropriate but at the time was a surprise.

I sat on the bed and talked to her. I told her how much she was loved, about all the love in the room. She raised herself and looked out the window, south to the skyline. She extended her left arm and scooped Manhattan into her. And out there, she said.

So she could feel it. It didn’t surprise her as much as it did the rest of us. Still, she was a writer, and writers do not have the deaths of celebrities—the kitschy mourning of strangers, the sad bodega flowers, TV tears, and then the sign-off from the anchor, She will be missed. Writers just slip away. They get an obit in the Times, maybe, and then a small gathering in some dreary West Side apartment, and then, with any luck or some pull and the proper ethnic bona fides, interment in the weathered cemeteries of the Hamptons. Nora would have scoffed at that, anyway—the last-minute lunge toward religion. It was always dangerous to die while Nora was alive. She had things to say.

Out there, past her outstretched arm, something was happening. There was a movement, a swelling, a something in the zeitgeist—a rolling groan of impending misery. She could feel it and she did not scoff at it because it was real and genuine. She had it coming, she seemed to feel. She had earned it.

But the rest of us were somehow, maybe inexplicably, amazed. Her family, her friends, the doctors chosen by her and thus credentialed as both brilliant and famous—all felt it. And were stunned. Yes, she was sort of famous and she had directed movies, written acclaimed screenplays and best sellers, and even had plays both on and off Broadway and another show in the works. There had been hints. Her books sold really well. And when she made an appearance, throngs materialized. We who knew her, we who had been her friends, we who loved her (not always or all the time), we who still hear her voice on the phone—Hello, it’s Nora.—were too close to see what was happening.

The sorrow came through the window, up off the East River, and it had a power. Afterward, some young person wrote a tribute to her in the Washington Post. His name was James McCauley. He had known her. She had made time for him while he was at Harvard and had stayed in touch after he went to work as an intern on the editorial staff of the Post. I was her friend. I was a longtime Washington Post columnist. I knew nothing about the young man.

There was an item in the newspaper about Nora and the writer Nathan Englander. He had written a short story about Stalin’s murder of the Soviet Union’s most acclaimed Yiddish writers. It was called The 27th Man, and it was contained in a collection that Nora had read. The item said that Nora had gotten in touch with Englander and arranged a breakfast at Barney Greengrass, the famous West Side deli. She told him his story could be a play. She told him she would help him. From then on, they met from time to time. The play opened at the Public Theater in December of 2012. Nora had died in June.

I was stunned by the newspaper item. Yiddish writers? Nora could hardly have cared less. A writer on Jewish themes? Not my darling Nora. She once sat through one of my Passover Seders like a traveler marooned in a train station. She abhorred religion. She abhorred my sanctimonious Judaism, erratically and idiosyncratically practiced in delayed homage to the Holocaust. But here she was helping to write a play about Yiddish writers. And she had said nothing to me about the project—me who consumed Jewish history and was, even then, writing a book about Jews and Israel.

I emailed Englander. I confessed mystification. I know you’re busy, but I’d like to meet you and also get to know Nora better, I wrote. I’d even go to Brooklyn.

We met for lunch. I wanted to know more. I wanted to know the Nora he knew. The Nora the kid at the Post knew. The Nora whom others were writing about, notably Lena Dunham. Some of these people turned to me to ask similar questions. I had the answers, they thought. I was her friend, her best friend she had told others, and I knew her better than anyone. Whether that was true I still don’t know, but I do know that she knew me better than anyone—including, I’m sure she would add, myself.

I Am Not Now and Never Have Been a Girl

I don’t know what I’m doing, writing this book. Nora Ephron was my friend and I knew her well—very well indeed—but I did not know her as well as I thought, or, maybe more important, as well as other people thought. The other people were all friends of Nora’s and they would often defer to me when it came to knowledge of her, to which I would nod in a combination of amazement and false humility. But I did not know the whole of her life because the whole was so much bigger than I realized—all those friends, so much work, so much written, so many movies made, or written and sometimes not made, so many essays and blogs and mere wisps of articles, some accompanied by recipes, not to mention interviews in which she said the most amazing things—and there is this: I am not a girl.

I state the obvious because it was not, until recently, obvious to me. Of course, I always knew there were gaps in our friendship. We were never lovers, and so I did not know her in that way, but more important—and more germane—was this business of gender, which has nothing to do with sex. On a kind of trivial level, it meant that I never went shopping with her—although she did with me—and we never talked about fashion or purses or cooking or food, and rarely about children, of which she had two and I one. Nora, as countless number of her female friends would tell you, was a girlie girl. Her champagne was pink and her signature cake was called the Pink Cake. She loved being a girl and she was very, very good at it.

Being a woman was extremely important to Nora and, of course, to her readers. She wrote incessantly, not to mention brilliantly, about the problems of being a woman, not just about small breasts and curdled necks and vaginal odor, but about the very essence of being a woman. She raged against beautiful women who complained that their beauty was a handicap—no one took them seriously, they lamented. She, in response, never took them seriously.

Her great fame came from the movies, as a screenwriter first and then a director, then both. In the business—the business is what her parents, screenwriters both, called Hollywood—she was a rarity. The business is not kind to female directors, of which there have been relatively few. A director is kind of a despot, a CEO, a head coach—in other words, a man. Can a woman command? Can she dominate? Can she, if she has to, fire the people who have to go? If challenged, can she push back?

Over the years, Nora proved she could. She fired the kid, the very cute kid, who wasn’t working out on Sleepless in Seattle—She fired the kid! a still disbelieving Tom Hanks exclaimed years later. When the prop man on Bewitched contemptuously ignored her instructions about precisely what kind of English muffins to get—the script specified Wolferman’s—she fired him, too.

On Mixed Nuts, she fired the actor Kadeem Hardison in the first week of shooting. She didn’t think he was delivering, the actor Rita Wilson recalled. She fired somebody the first week of shooting, which was kind of her tradition to fire somebody the first week of shooting.

At the same time, she oozed thoughtfulness and kindness. While directing Bewitched, she not only implored her cast and crew the day before Election Day to vote, but gave them a late call time so that they could. She had a TV monitor placed on the set to get the early East Coast results. On that same movie, she chartered a bus and took everyone down to Langer’s, the hallowed Los Angeles delicatessen, so they could have its fabled pastrami sandwiches. In both New York and L.A., she was forever organizing expeditions to exotic local restaurants and not, as some directors do, eating either by herself or with a select few cast members.

I rarely heard Nora complain about being a woman in Hollywood. She seemed to assume that I understood, which I did in a way. But it was a man’s way, which was sympathetic but maybe not empathetic. I was not in her shoes, and those shoes, anyway, seemed to be ballet slippers of some kind. Nora, I thought, could dance above anything (although she, like me, hated to dance). I thought of her as powerful, strong, and immensely capable. I knew she was vulnerable, insecure about matters that for too long I did not take seriously, like her leitmotif about breasts. I read her famous 1972 Esquire magazine essay, A Few Words About Breasts, as a chuckly rant, somewhat exaggerated for comedic effect, not realizing it represented the deep rage of a woman who noticed how a man’s eye would drop chest level upon introduction. She had little to stop the eye. She dazzled in other ways. In fact, she dazzled in most ways.

On occasion—maybe on several occasions—I was simply on a different planet, one where men talk to men about women. When Nora was pregnant with Jacob, her firstborn, her gynecologist, Sheldon Cherry, showed her pictures of twins in the womb. Now, this was 1978, and the sonogram was new; pictures of twins had never been taken before. To everyone’s surprise, they showed one twin pummeling the other, and since I was a twin myself, Nora summoned me to New York from Washington and I went to see a very nice Dr. Cherry, who showed me the same pictures. Sure enough, one twin—later determined to be the male—was kicking the other, the female. I was stunned by what I saw.

Nora remembered it a bit differently. In a wonderful essay for the New York Times titled Baby, she wrote that one fetus was punching, not kicking, the other. It hardly matters. What does matter is what she wrote about telling me. I was identified as a Washington friend: I thought he would be interested to know that he probably has genuine cause to resent his brother as much as he does, she wrote. I have a sister, but never mind. That information, however, is not at all what he responded to, she went on.

‘Fascinating,’ he said. ‘I guess it makes you feel different about abortion, doesn’t it?’ He said this in the triumphant matter of many men I know who believed their opinions on this subject to be morally superior to mine.

I recall nothing of this conversation, but I am willing to concede it happened because I have always been both pro-choice and yet uneasy about abortion. And it strikes me as just possible that I did not grant pro-choice women the same element of confusion-contradiction because abortion was too often stridently presented as a feminist issue.

If so, I had Nora wrong. I have never believed that there was anything simple about abortion, Nora wrote. She went on to castigate the women’s movement for making it seem otherwise—for insisting that abortion has nothing to do with anything but a woman’s need to control her own body.

Baby is a long essay of sparking brilliance. It is a kind of Magna Carta of common sense—not only Nora’s reprimand to me but also her rejection of trendy feminist dogma, her realization, for instance, that the patronizing authority of the male physician was simply being replaced by the patronizing authority of zealous natural childbirth advocates and their belief that pain and purity were synonymous. One tyranny had been replaced by another and each time the patient, the woman, was being told what to do and not necessarily for her own sake.

There was then and always an air about Nora of great wisdom—not merely, if I may correct myself, of great wisdom, but of greater wisdom. She was smart, very smart, and knowledgeable, very knowledgeable, but beyond that she had an inerrant touch for the best of almost anything. She herself was a tastemaker and she did not recommend anything lightly, casually, as if it did not matter. She not only knew what she liked, she knew why she liked it.

Her mentor in matters culinary and such was Lee Bailey, who ran a boutique out of Bendel’s on Fifth Avenue and a salon out of his country place in Bridgehampton. Bailey was a renaissance man of style, a champion of simplicity (no hors d’oeuvres), who showed Nora both how to set the table and how to wear her hair. It was undoubtedly he who led her to Bridge Kitchenware, a very upscale housewares store on East 52nd Street. The place was founded by Fred Bridge and had a distinct French flavor. It became a favorite of Craig Claiborne, the longtime restaurant critic for the New York Times and an unparalleled foodie. Bridge was where the cognoscenti bought their knives, pans, and, as it turned out, food processors. It is where I bought mine.

The Cuisinart food processor became ubiquitous in the mid-1970s. If the device had one subtle but fatal drawback it was that it was invented by an American and sold by an American company. That, apparently, would not do, and Nora insisted that my wife and I buy a French device from Bridge. So one day in New York, I trudged over there and bought the French food processor. I remember dropping Nora’s name, and being warmly greeted—a celebrity by extension.

I was enormously proud of my French food processor, so clearly different and superior to the pedestrian and common Cuisinart that I overlooked its galling shortcomings. After all, it had an unimpeachable and daunting provenance—the Bridge Co., Nora, Lee Bailey, and by extension Craig Claiborne and most of France. It was, in fact, an inferior product—not much good at slicing, as I recall—but it was retained not so much for what it did but what it said. Then one day I noticed that in Nora’s own kitchen, the klutzy Gallic device was gone. It had been replaced by the utterly common Cuisinart. I got one myself.

Nora’s domain was the kitchen, and she ruled it not just with superior knowledge but with an assurance that simply brooked no questions. At about the time of the Cuisinart silliness, our kitchen in Washington was in dire need of modernization. As luck would have it, Nora had recommended our house for the shooting of Heartburn. In exchange for the inconvenience of turning our home into a movie set, we were to get a brand-new kitchen. Into that kitchen would go, besides the fancy French non-slicing food processor, a huge refrigerator-freezer, a Garland restaurant-style stove the size of a modest Bessemer converter, and—quite dear to my heart—a sprayer for the sink. It was, as far I was concerned, the handiest thing to have in the kitchen.

One night I rattled off the things I’d like the studio to provide. At the mention of the sprayer, Nora frowned. Why would anyone want a sink sprayer? she demanded. The question was asked with such contempt that I immediately realized that I had failed to see the utter worthlessness of the thing. I considered that it might be dangerous as well.

In the end, Paramount found that my house did not look like it belonged in Washington. The kitchen remained untouched, but Nora’s condemnation of the sink sprayer stayed with me. What did she see that I could not? Indeed, what could she see that so many others could not? When I was in other people’s homes, I would sneak into the kitchen and closely examine the sink sprayer. What? What?

Several years later, Nora upgraded her own kitchen. Voilà, a sink sprayer! What had happened? I asked. How come she had changed her mind? She looked at me as if I had gone batty. She had never condemned the eminently utilitarian sink sprayer, she said. Why would she? It was a marvelous device, good for, among other things, spraying. But . . . , I started, but she gave me that look, that you are a fool but my friend anyway look. One of us was crazy. But one of us had a sink sprayer and the other didn’t. And as Nora would say, so there.

Nora had many audiences. She was a female director. But she was also a female newspaper writer and a female magazine writer and a female magazine editor and a female book writer and screenwriter and blogger and a mother and a wife three times over. She had had all these roles, and in retrospect, she timed them perfectly, working for Newsweek when it was at its rambunctious best, and then moving on to the New York Post when tabloids were the appropriate vehicle for covering a seemingly deranged city, and then magazines like Esquire and New York when they were both explosively innovative, and then movies in one capacity or another and the stage, where her parents had begun and where they, too, ended.

She seemed always to be in the right place at the right time, and so her story is also the story of those times and those publications and art forms—their importance and their whoopee fun. Like some peripatetic foreign correspondent, she covered her share of revolutions—the sexual one, the feminist one, the Watergate one (it toppled a president), and the post-Watergate one in which journalism emerged with all its smug righteousness—so important, so very important.

In all her roles she would pause and take stock of what was happening. She hovered above herself, a crane shot in which Nora Ephron could observe Nora Ephron and get the necessary distance to see the humor in her pathos. She wrote about being a girl and then a college student and then a single woman on the make for a career and on the make for men as well. None of these essays were confessions and none of them asked for sympathy. They were reports by a reporter observing herself as material—copy. She was not merely amusing about others. She was amusing about herself.

Nora chronicled what it was like to be a woman in almost every stage of life, including aging. She was direct about it; she didn’t like it one bit, not what it did to her neck, her memory, her energy, and even her sex drive. She wrote with a precise and disarming honesty, with a between-us-girls kind of touch. Women found a soul mate, a companion, while for men her stuff was an immense voyeuristic opportunity: Oh, so that’s what they think!

Yet she did not write about dying. She did not write about her disease or mention that she had always had a claustrophobic fear of cancer. It seemed to her that it was omnipresent, always lurking, and that the disease that had killed her mother’s beloved younger brother, Dickie, at the age of only twenty-eight, was somehow stalking her. Once or twice when she had some procedure done—removal of her thyroid, for instance—I could hear the dread in her voice and would dismiss it with a joke, not appreciating her fear. Yet when it came, she kept it mostly to herself.

She inadvertently dropped hints. There were signs. She and her husband, Nicholas Pileggi, were regulars on the yacht owned by David Geffen, the entertainment mogul. The boat was a 423-foot behemoth. It lacked nothing—not a gym, not salons, not staterooms with drop-down TV screens imbedded in the ceiling—and yet Nora once said she had to get off and see a doctor, and the reason she gave was dehydration. This on a yacht where an outstretched arm would immediately be met by a crew member bearing a bottle of Fiji water. The other guests were puzzled, but they did not catch on.

Neither did The Harpies. This was a luncheon group of women who met irregularly in New York. The name was given to them by Liz Smith, the gossip columnist (an original member of Lee Bailey’s set) and a charter member. (The group was formed by Jeanne McCarthy and included Barbara Walters, Lisa Caputo, Peggy Siegal, Cynthia McFadden, Maurie Perl, Beth Kseniak, and Jennifer Maguire Isham—some of the most powerful women in the communications business.) Nora called the last meeting for May 8, 2012, and designated, for its truffles, La Petite Maison as the meeting place. By then, she was only weeks away from going into the hospital. I’m going under the radar, she told the group. Everyone thought it was a work project, probably a movie.

Kate Capshaw almost caught on. Along with her husband, Steven Spielberg, she had grown close to Nora and relied on her for advice, for wisdom, for validation, but, frustratingly, not for hugs. (Nora was not a hugger.) Nora had lost weight, she noticed. Nora was looking wan. The change in Nora’s appearance kept Capshaw up at night, and Nora had told her that if you can’t sleep, if something is keeping you up at night, you have to face it, stare it down.

So she called Nora. I said I am really sorry to bother you, but I am sleepless and you always said that if you’re pacing at night, you have to take care of it. And Kate got emotional. "It’s me talking and I am just very worried about you and